Wednesday, 13 May 2015

A Conversation about Comics (full version)

If you wouldn’t mind just introducing who you are and what
department you are in that would be great.

PC: My name is Patricia-Pia Célérier. I teach in French and
Francophone Studies and I’m a member of Africana Studies.

PA: I’m Peter Anteleyes. I’m in the English Department. I
also teach in Media Studies and Jewish Studies.

HD: I’m Hiromi Dollase. I teach Japanese and Japanese
literature, popular literature, and I belong to the Chinese and Japanese
Department, but I’m also a member of the Asian Studies program.

CM: The first question is a classic question: How did you
get into comics? What age? And how has that developed into your academic life?

PC: I’m French, from Paris. Graphic novels and comics are
everywhere in French culture. You collect books, you collect comics, and people
go about it very systematically. Just as you know your filmmakers, you know
your graphic authors. It’s part of the general culture. From my own story, I’ve
always read comics. My family kind of tends to horde things, keep memories,
history from the great grandparents, so when I was 8, 10 years old – they must
be very valuable now – we had copies of old publications by LE POILU DE DIX
ANS. This was a comic that was very nationalistic and was created after the First
World War. It was supposed to enlist, creating ties, nationalistic pride. We
had that around the house. My grandparents, my paternal grandparents had that.

PA: Were Hergé and Asterix, you
know?

PC: Asterix came afterwards. But, Hergé, basically, it’s a
staple in all French households. You have Hergé, and it’s not a matter of
generations. You have it around, you grow up with that.

HD: Is it common in France to encourage kids to be
familiarized with comics? Do they encourage kids to read comics at a younger
age?

PC: Yes. Everybody reads comics. The press, the publishing
world, has really, I would say in the past 20-25 years, the French publishing
world has really developed. Many kids have subscriptions. Some of them more
expensive than others. You also have a system of public libraries that is very
developed. So, people go on Wednesday afternoons, when you’re off from school,
you go to your public library. That’s what kids do. They read comics from very,
very, very young, 3-4 years old.

PA: It’s so different here. What’s
it like in Japan?

HD: I have a very different experience. I think I started
reading comics, but graphic novels, we call it manga, around 6 years old. I
started reading manga because of the influence of animation, TV animation, a
series called Candy Candy.

PC: Oh, je la connais !

HD: Yes it was in Europe too.

PC: I know Candy. We had Candy on public television. (Starts
singing the theme song.)

HD: It takes place in America. It’s a story about an orphan
girl adopted by a rich family, but she decided to live independently. She
eventually becomes an artist (?). But, she’s always supported by someone who
never reveals his identity. So it’s like Daddy Long Legs. There were all of
those girl’s stories like that, so that was extremely popular on TV around that
time, around the mid-70s. Then I decided to read manga, which it is based upon,
but my parents didn’t like that kids read manga. They want kids to read more
like literature, written like a novel, written not in comic form. So, I asked
my parents for just one volume, I’ll just read it once, and then that’s it.
Then the neighbor and I used to read hidden behind my parents, hide the comics
and circulate them among my friends. A very negative view back then.

PA: Interesting because it’s changed now. Manga shops are
everywhere. It’s something that people are very comfortable going into shops,
sitting down, and reading.

CM: But there is still a stigmatization in Japan of the
obsession with manga. I know there’s the pejorative term otaku.

HD: Yeah, yeah, there is a stigmatization, but at the same
time, young kids don’t read anything nowadays except for the Internet! So even
schools, even the government, encourage kids to read manga. There are a lot of
historical stories, actual history, in manga form, teaching about economics in
manga. There are a lot of educational manga at the same time.

PA: It’s similar to earlier on in Japan because comics were
criticized for causing juvenile delinquency and they were considered a low art
form. It’s hard enough to get Americans to read anyway. Though, all my students
talk about how avid they were reading comic books, reading Archie, reading
superhero books, which are getting increasingly sophisticated. But, even so,
their younger siblings don’t feel that comfortable walking around with comic
books. Because comics were not that well accepted when I would young, I was
reading newspaper comics mainly and those fascinated me. It wasn’t until the
‘80s and Art Spiegelman’s Maus came
out that I realized this was something else. This could be a richer field. As a
result of that, I started reading interviews of him and he would mention a
number of other people and I would go to them and I would start this network. I
was lucky because that’s when comic studies in the States began to emerge. I
don’t know what its status is elsewhere, but people then started collecting
early newspaper strips, early comics. At the same time, there was this
incredible marketplace of collectors that started to emerge in the States.
Suddenly, all the materials became re-available. I can’t remember when comics
could be taught in American academies. For all of us, it’s fairly recent.

HD: In Japan, also. Around the ‘80s is when manga began to
be treated as an academic subject.

PA: Is that right? Yeah, because
it was later here.

PC: Popular literature. Sociology and literature coming
together and looking at popular productions. I want to come back to the issue
of manga. In terms of France, mangas are being appropriated by French and
francophone graphic artists. In France, I would say very generally, the
comic/graphic novel scene, as is music, is organized around festivals. There
are many, many festivals, particularly in the summer. The two big comics and
graphic novels festivals are Angoulême, which happens in January/February. It’s
a great mass of comics. You could say it’s the equivalent of the Cannes Film
Festival for graphic novels. Then you have Saint-Denis, which is right outside
Paris, more geared towards chilPren’s comic production. This year at Angoulême,
the person who got the first prize of the awards was [Jiro] Taniguchi for all
of his works. You have people, mangakas, like Junji Ito who works with horror
manga and Atsushi Koneko who works in the detective genre of manga. And they
all got prizes, they all gave master classes that were very attended.

HD: What do you mean by master
classes?

PC: Well they show how they build scenarios, how they draw
manga. They basically do a master class in manga.

PA: It’s such a syncretic business. I was thinking about
manga, too. Manga started partly out of Japanese traditions and culture, but
partly out of American popular culture. You have Disney, film noir. They
adopted these aesthetic elements and changed them, and then they came back to
the states as anime, before manga, and anime then influenced American writers,
who were sort of being influenced by themselves.

HD: If you go back to the origin of manga, especially girl’s
manga, we can find the origin in art nouveau, from early 20th
century type of drawing. It is really cross-cultural, influencing each other
internationally.

PA: If you look at contemporary American comics now, aside
from the fact that they are digitally designed, which is different from most
manga that you find, they’re using the same sort of page designs as manga.
They’re incorporating the sort of comics within comics, the hyper expressive.

C: It’s a series type of thing.

PA: Yeah, it’s a fascinating question as to how one locates
national characteristics now around manga. That when you study comics, the
things that I’ve found, you have to think about aesthetics, you have to think
about the socio-economics of the industry, you have to think about sociology,
you have to think about reception and demographics. There’s no end to what you
can do when you think through these lineages and what they actually mean.

CM: The connection that you see historically, do you see it
in your work here at Vassar? In your academics? Are you studying manga in the
English Department? Are you looking to American comics to explain historical
changes in manga over the years? In France, you’ve discussed manga themes or
ideas but being taken by French writers.

PC: I mean no, I don’t start from manga. The class that I
teach is a specific class. The course is on comic art, but also in Africa. It’s
very specific. It’s very intricate; it’s a very ambitious class because we’re
doing a lot. We’re looking at techniques, like what is comic art, how does one
produce comic art, how does one analyze comic art, what is the terminology, how
do you get in, what do you see. We’re looking at history. We’re looking at
francophone production and we’re looking at francophone production in Africa,
in the press, and also the intersection with Hergé for example, with Tintin au Congo, we’re looking at
thematically, what Africa has meant in some francophone productions. And what
does this mean, what has been the reception. What was the reception in 1937?
What is the reception now? And why might there be some issues that are being
discussed in new terms. So, we’re doing a lot. But, your question was do we
look at manga. Yeah so we come to manga at the end of the class. We look at
francophone manga production in basically right now Guadeloupe and Martinique,
which is where it’s emerging, and Mauritius. The manga techniques are being
used increasingly.

HD: When I use manga in my class, I just spend one day
briefly talking about them from a cultural perspective. I haven’t really
developed a nice curriculum of teaching manga comics. I think my focus is more
on content than culture, so it means that I don’t look at manga from an
American perspective or anything like that, but eventually I would like to
broaden my knowledge. I think it’s a great opportunity to learn from each
other.

PA: Sure. I think that for a field, and not an academic
field, I mean for modern comics and graphic novels themselves, which have been
around for 150 years, it’s sort of stunning we’re just, within the last 5, 8,
10 years beginning to do this in our own teaching. I don’t know if you’ve been
doing it longer.

PC: I’ve been using comics for a while. It’s true that there
was a, just as you said Alex that the teaching of graphic novels and comics has
been hindered by perceptions that it was 1. not a deserving kind of objective
study and also if it were deserving by any chance it was related to
children.So we had to work from under
that. It just so happens that in the American academic world, and particularly
at Vassar, we are very lucky to have extremely creative students, and students
who have wonderful imaginations. I think for me, I think for all of us,
teaching about comics allows us to tap into many different resources.

PA and HD: Yeah, yeah.

PC: For me, I try to underline for my students that studying
graphic novels allows us to rethink how literary analysis, how one comes to a
text, how unique a text the graphic novel is.

PA: Especially with the increasing visual sophistication and
visual saturation that our students are going through, even a term like graphic
novel – it was a term that was designed to elevate the field, even though some
graphic novels are just comics in sequence put together in one binding – so
that there are all these sorts of collateral circulations that we developed as
a way to talk about these things. When I started teaching, I had parents that
would complain.

HD: Really?

PA: That “I don’t understand. You’re at Vassar. Why are you
teaching comics or graphic novels?”

HD: When was that?

PA: I would say that was 7-8
years ago.

CM: That recently.

PA: That recently. Even
colleagues of mine

PC: Yeah. Yeah.

PA: who would argue “I don’t understand. You should be
teaching.” As if this material is something you enjoy under the covers, but not
something that as you say.

PC: But I think it would still be very much of a question.
Let’s say if a course were to be cut for any financial issues, I mean it’s
still up in the air that this could be a graphic novel class. The question is: Would
a course on graphic novels and BD, bandes
dessinées in general, be more deserving of academic credibility?

HD: In Japan, the study of manga is pretty respected. There
are schools with manga studies program. I never experienced any criticism or
anything like that. But, to legitimize the reason why I study manga, I think
that particularly manga is media for young, for example shoujo manga, girl’s
manga, that’s perspective is usually from young women’s perspective. I find
that manga has a lot of potential for feminist reading. That area hasn’t been
really studied well in the US, I think. In Japan, I think can be used as a case
study or as psychoanalysis or things like that. It is pretty well respected.

PA: I also think there’s a kind of environment where people
are increasingly understanding that media, that no medium stands alone. If
you’re going to study manga, you have to understand the differences, but you
might want to study anime, you might want to study video games, you might want
to study MMOs, film, television, even painting and sculpture, since part of
what comics does is freeze time and space. So, that once you start thinking
about these things as integrated rather than here’s this one little thing we
can elevate, it becomes more respectable but even more necessary as a way to
think about critical thinking and critical reading.

CM: How do you bring that into the class, the interplay
between the art? The images and the scenario? How do you contrast that with
only written literature?

HD: I haven’t really developed my way of teaching by using
manga, so I have always been focusing on content. So the area of art is
probably something I have to learn from other professors. How do you teach it?

PA: I started by integrating film actually. I found that I
could teach things through film, even theory through film, that was harder to
teach through literature, but when they became better readers of film, they
became better readers of literature. The more I add dimensions, dimensions of
text – I’ll do music in class, I’ll do a graphic novel – I keep increasing what
is a text, what needs to be read, what are the various discourses one has to be
aware of, that they become better integrative readers. I actually find that the
students don’t at all find that to be difficult. It’s like changing a key in a
popular song. It’s sounds like something new but you can come back to it in all
new ways.

PC: In my class we do several things. We start with Tintin au Congo. Then we look at the
corpus of graphic novels that have developed since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda,
for example. And that’s hard. In doing that, we look at technical issues,
colorization, we look at how the subject matter is being dealt with, the points
of view. Of course we look at content. We also look at the limital apperitives.
Does it come with a preface? Does it come with a postface? Then we move to bandes dessinées of conscientization. We
look at the press. After that we go back for more uplifting comics, Aya de Yopougon for example, and how you
mediate, representation of Africa, how one can move from bandes dessinées dealing with genocide to Aya, a more uplifting vision of Africa. What we think about this.
Towards the end of the semester, we move towards music. We go back, we look at bandes dessinées, La dette odieuse, The Odious
Debt, and which is the debt, the IMF which is very political. But, we look
also at it from the standpoint of music. We listen to Tiken Jah Fakoly and
Alpha Blondie who are Ivorian reggae people, who have been demonstrating
against this type of new forms of colonization. And also towards the end we
look at the connection between bande
dessinée and film. We move to [Marjane] Satrapi, we look at Persepolis, and then we look at Aya, which has been newly adapted.

CM: Even Aya has
heavy themes to it, which separates it from the common conception of comic
books as being

PA: Escapist

CM: For children. Yes, Calvin
and Hobbes, which also has heavy themes in it. Beatle Bailey. I’m just thinking of American short comics. How do
you break away from this conception in your academics?

PC: We have bright students who
break away from it.

PA: I’m not sure it’s necessary to fight that fight. Like
you say, all you need to do is present them as cultural vehicles like any
production of art, and say, “What are the assumptions going on here? How are
these ideas not only being embodied in but constituted by the forms of the
art?” You can talk about anything.

PC: Any artistic production is an historical production, so
are not ahistorical, so they come in a context that when being explained brings
up questions that students get curious about and hungry to answer.

PA: One of the things that struck me, Patricia, when you
were talking, the extent to which – we’ve just started our own conversations,
becoming aware of each other, and partly because it’s so nice to see this
spreading out in the curriculum, other people taking chances, who aren’t as
comfortable and trying to figure out how it might work, so we’ve talked about
coming to each other’s classes, how we think about the works, how we teach the
works. It breaks my heart of how little is translated. In terms of manga, I’m
having a class with a student who did a thesis for me last year, which was
basically a graphic self-critical thesis, where she’s looking at her notebooks
at age 12, where she was influenced by manga, by anime, by online role-playing
games, and so on. I said “Okay why don’t I spend this last class talking a bit
about manga”, and I was about to call you [Hirome] up, because then I thought
“Oh my God” I put together a Powerpoint of seven or eight of the types of
manga, even though there are way more. And they were overwhelmed. There are
kinds of manga I don’t even have access to that I don’t know about historically.

HD: Translation is a problem, and translated works are very
limited. Very recent ones which have been adapted in anime or manga. Talking
about translation, I sometimes encourage students to use manga for a senior
project. So, this is an example I brought. This is a translation of a manga a
student did in 2007. This is a story about ghosts. This one is about a
daughter’s incestual relationship with her father and really scary and
interesting. She used a demon mask, which is very traditional image. It has a
lot of depth in it. And this student translated it. And I used this work when I
taught my Gothic and Supernatural Literature course and circulated this translated
work among other students who don’t know Japanese at all. But, they can get to
read this manga. These are from the 1980s. This author is very knowledgeable
about feminist issues. I can tell that she really understands feminism. It is
the perfect material to teach gothic tradition and gender issue. I think
teaching through manga has a lot of potential. I’m a language teacher as well,
so I try to integrate a language teaching aspect.

PA: When Emma worked on her thesis with me, Emma ended up
doing a hybrid thesis that was part graphic part written that integrated images
from the works she was looking at, women’s diaries, comics, and also it
integrated her own drawing. It was a way of recognizing there are different
ways to learn than simply the model of writing the argument, it being
completely verbal or literary. These other ways are different kinds of ways of
constituting knowledge, of doing reading.

PC: In my class, we have a syllabus, but also each student
draws their own comic. It’s portfolio based. We have this intricate syllabus,
but then I teach them each stage of creating a graphic novel. At different
points, they will have to hand in this and that, and at the end they do
beautiful things. Really interesting stuff.

HD: How do you evaluate the students?

PC: That’s a good question. Participation, reading,
presence, they have to do research and identify a francophone comic, a current graphic
novel, that they are going to do an oral presentation on. They will have an
oral presentation grade. They have three written papers in French, so they’re
working the French, and they have their own artistic creation. They can do it
two students together, or they can do it by themselves.

HD: So the students all
understand French?

PC: The course is cross-listed in Africana Studies and
French, but it is in French. So it’s also a language class, like yours, and
also a class in which we work on the French, written and oral. So they do two
versions of the papers, and I correct the mistakes. We do workshops with the language.
Once or twice in the semester.

HD: So they read graphic novels
in French?

PC: Yeah absolutely. Francophone graphic art production is
huge. You mentioned feminism in manga. There are many ages of feminism in
francophone graphic art and many forms. Teaching that class, I’ve had to make
strong choices and, in a way, to reduce, to go a little deeper, to bring it
down. In a way it’s frustrating, but that’s what you have to do.

HD: I think language is always a difficulty when I seriously
teach manga because translated materials are very limited. It’s very difficult
to teach about manga history by using some of the examples.

PC: And the theoretical texts available. Right now, I don’t
know if I’m right about this, but right now in terms of theory, you have many
more things written in English than in French.

PA: Yeah.

PC: But in French, you have a lot of sources. But, they tend
to be shorter articles. To a certain extent, it’s a relief because in my
syllabus I’ve put mixture of English theoretical texts and French theoretical
texts. In a way, it serves my purpose because it allows my students to breathe,
to reach more, but have a little bit of a break in terms of the study of
French.

PA: Well I think a lot of the really interesting theory in
comics was coming from France, in the same way with theory generally. But only
a little of that has been translated into English. So it’s a struggle to get
access to each other’s work. But what you say about having to reduce, one of
the difficulties of even having the three of us focusing on this material is
how much we’re not able to do. I have a class which is basically modular now,
where I want to teach American things, I want to teach French things, I want to
teach manga, I want to teach issues of race and representation, I want to teach
about gender and sexuality in comics, I want them to know about something
comics’ history. And that’s like an 82 week modular course, so you have to kind
of mix and match and realize that there should be a broader curricular range
available.

PC: This type of course elicits in students a lot of
passion. So, the students come up with questions they want to explore. They
open new doors. As instructors, we want to answer these types of questions.
Sometimes we have to take something out of the syllabus to allow the students
to deal with their own questions.

CM: Especially with Charlie Hebdo.

PC: Charlie Hebdo
is a very good example because you’re looking at a question of presentation and
freedom of speech.

PA: But then there’s a whole history with political
cartoons, which are different from comics. Then it’s sort of a genre issue.

CM: That’s going to go way back
into France.

PC: Right. Then you’re looking at ARA QUI RIT (?). But
you’re also looking at very thick histories, since the seventeenth.

PA: Including in the 18th century, Hogarth and
people like that. The use of satire. Comics originating in satire.

HD: Political comics can be a
one semester course!

PA: Absolutely!

PC: When you deal with Africa, you have a lot of very
important satirical newspapers such as Le
lynxe, Gbich ! in the Ivory
Coast. You also have to look into the culture itself, the Ivory Coast. You have
to look at Senegal, look at the press. You have to look at literature in these
countries.

PA: That’s the problem. You want to give them as much
coverage, and you lose that ability to adapt like you’re talking about. Going
off of just what you said earlier, students come in with these niche interests,
so I get a lot of superhero comic people there are DC comic people, there are
Marvel comic people. I get a lot of people who are interested in manga,
particularly young women who started reading manga when they were young. They
all come in with these “I thought that’s what comics was”, so you have to
destabilize the idea of what they thought the field was and understand it in
terms of the larger field. But, you also want to speak to their interests
because they bring extraordinarily rich and often archival knowledge of what
these fields consist of.

PC: And a keen vision. And a
wonderful, younger vision.

PA: On some level we’re all dealing with the Internet, too.
The sort of proliferation of materials not just made available the Internet but
being constituted on the Internet. I was thinking about when you brought the
person to talk about shoujo, I hadn’t known that there’s this underground
economy that immediately translates manga like the second it’s released.

CM: Yeah, I use that.

PC: What do you mean you use it,
Alex?

CM: It’s not the most legal method of reading manga. I go to
a website. I used to go to a website, but the manga that it was “producing”, by
that I mean manga in Japan. As far as I understand, it’s photocopied into
someone’s computer, someone sends that to someone else, they Photoshop out the
Japanese characters, someone translates the Japanese characters, and then
replaces it with English.

PA: And then posts it.

CM: And then posts it online. And I’ve been through several
websites that have had their whole archive of Naruto or Bleach taken
down because of copyright laws.

PA: And they keep popping up
elsewhere.

CM: You can still find it. When I was looking for comics to
buy for Madame Célérier’s class, it was harder to find a place to buy French
comic books. You have FNAC, you have Amazon.fr. To just find African comic
books in general…

PC: It’s hard.

CM: These manga websites are exhaustive. They come out with
at least 20 new manga volumes each day and every week.

PC: It’s on the move. There are
new platforms now.

CM: It is moving to the
Internet. I used to buy Shonen Jump.

A: But it’s so expensive after
awhile.

CM: It is! Especially with manga. Where it’s volume after
volume after volume, because it’s a really long story. That’s what I was
thinking about when you were talking about trying to broaden the idea of what
comic books are, what graphic novels are, where you have the US and French,
they create one story in 120 pages, 80 pages and manga has a lot of volumes.

HD: That’s why it’s difficult to
teach manga.

PA: What are you going to do?
Show one volume?

HD: Normally with manga, one whole set comes with something
like 20 volumes. I can’t ask students to purchase that.

PC: I think it’s also a trend generally. For example, in my
“field” which is African literature, the publications since the ‘90s have books
and books being published. It used to be that in the ‘80s, you could “keep
track of the field”, who was publishing what and when. Now I can’t keep up. So
there’s a general trend, there’s a tremendous multiplication of increasing
production.

PA: Right. I was just thinking about this issue of what’s
accessible and what’s not, because in some ways there’s increasing access, but
then I wanted to teach Tintin in the
Congo but, of course, you can’t buy it in the US now because it’s
considered a racist text.

CM: In English?

PA: In English you can’t buy it. There are a few EBay people
who have it for $235. But, that should be taught. And even Hergé had his
thoughts about it later, and you want to teach that history but you don’t have
access. I’m lucky if I get a couple pages off the Internet. I got the French
version, and I can translate a couple of pages, but I can’t teach that in my
English classes because they won’t know what to do with it. I can show them a
page and say, “Look at the minstrel figure and let’s talk about that”. The
problem is having too much and too little at the same time.

PC: You can invite me and I can
translate in class.

PA: That actually would be really useful. I also want them
to see that it’s an act of not just literal translation but of cultural
translation. I want them to think about that process: moving the text into this
context in an American college, what that means. That’s actually what we’re all
doing.

PC: I just wanted to come back to the idea of comics and
academia. I want to put that argument on its head to a certain extent. We said
before that academia was resisting the comic world, it didn’t have enough
credibility, etc. So, we’re going around this. I want to say also that at least
in France and francophone circles, the comic world is sort of the world of
geeks. It’s a world of people who are artists, sort of edgy, edgy and not
pretentious, kind of relaxed, open-minded. To a certain extent, it’s bringing
something precious to the academic world, which is a non-stiff creativity that
has increasing value.

PA: Yeah. There’s a language that was framed called termite
art, which is the art that’s allowed to flourish without anybody looking at it.
So that the sense of it being regulated and public and viewed and judged, when
you take all those away, this thing flourishes. It starts to create its own
histories, its own references, its own power in its relationship to its own
readership. And that’ becomes a really sort thing that’s valuable for us to
reach into.

PC: And it’s also a way – you know Duffy [and Jennings],
those two artists who came last week – they also brought to their art – they’re
a couple of geeks – they gave their art, they are incredibly talented, what
gave their creations a backbone was their original analysis of race and gender.
They brought through their art very cutting edge ways of looking at gender,
sexism, racism, that redefine how we think, I thought.

PA: What’s fascinating is that this book that they were
talking about this time, The Hole, which is about consumer culture, they
constructed it very self-consciously as a book available to the academy because
they’d been working with transient publishers, sort of struggling to find their
access to a larger audience. And one of the ways these books gain that kind of
audience is through the academy, so they produced a sort of apparatus to the
book. It was a very smart move where the art remained radical, and the
apparatus, which was also radicalized in the book, becomes a way that this
material can be integrated into courses. That’s a different way of going about
this process, of producing art, of having it addressed, of having it
considered. I think we’re at this wonderful time when we can start drawing in
these materials that are just under the surface of awareness.

CM: This is coming back to conception of comic art as lowbrow
– that’s what academia sees it as.Doesn’t it give it the perfect ability to undermine the stuffiness of
academics? Because people who are going into comic art as a profession are the
kind of people who didn’t want to go into academics and use big words and
confuse people. Something in the comic art touched them and don’t you think
that’s how they want to affect people through their comic art? They do bring up
very mature subjects like Maus with
the Holocaust or sexism, racism, colonialism all in one comic book. That’s
heavy.

PA: There’s a famous conference in Chicago where Hilary Chute
was interviewing a series of comics artists. She’s an academician - and she, in
fact, co-taught a course with Alison Bechdel. She’s up there asking questions
about “Why did you frame it this way?” and one the artists, Lynda Barry,
started to mock the proceeding saying “When should this happen? In an
unconscious place.” There was a really rich conversation, which seemed to me to
lend itself more to the possibilities of what it meant to have these two groups
communicate and learn from each other rather than separate, or see themselves
as opposing factions. I think a lot of comics now are using the language of the
academy to pursue their art. And, a lot of comics artists are drawing on
someone like Lynda Barry to think about “What’s the source of comics?” and
“What are alternative histories we can constitute? Or alternative lexicons for
dealing with it?”

HD: These artists are more conscious about feminist issues
and so on than we think. They are not just drawing fantasies. They study, they
read a lot.

PC: It’s being taken for granted, it’s been recognized that
literacy includes visual literacy. This is the time we’re living in, so we
should align our teaching with it.

PA: I mean, there’s the phone. It’s a screen, and a screen
functions in the same way a comic’s panels do. Students know how to read their
screens when they’re god knows how young. They come into these classes already
being incredibly sophisticated, at least intuitive readers of how these visual
strategies work.

CM: Any final comments? Any comments about where you hope to
go with comic art in your academic fields? Pull from each other? Pull from
different media?

PA: I have to say, we’ve been at this institution for God
knows how many years and we didn’t know each other. And now we can get to know
each other. You [Patricia] and I just worked with each other on Blue is the
Warmest Color. I went into Patricia’s office thinking one thing and came out
thinking twelve different things and thinking about visual strategies. In the
clinical term, it’s faculty development. In a larger term, it’s just being
intellectually alive.

PC: And fun.

PA: And fun! The joy of being able to talk to these two
people is just astonishing to me.

CM: It’s kind of Liberal Arts turned back around. I’m
supposed to be taking a Chinese and Japanese course, an English course, and a
French course, and science, but now it’s the faculty who are exploring. Liberal
Arts is an opportunity to explore all the disciplines. It’s not separate.

PA: It’s both collaborative, but it’s also a sense of
knowledge not being based around disciplines so much as other ways of thinking
about those connections, as a network of bodies of knowledge and approaches.

HD: I think my idea of literature and comics also has been
confined in a cultural notion. “I’m studying Japanese.” So theory, articles,
everything, I just read some articles written by someone who does Japanese
Studies. But now, after having this conversation, I feel like should probably
start reading comic series or books written about comics and articles, then
think about how I can apply those theories to Japanese manga. That would be an
interesting approach that nobody has done in Japan, right? That’s a new project
for me now. [Laughs.]

PC: I come from dance. I’ve always been into music. To me,
it’s also a wonderful pretext to further include my loves, what I like to do.
African literatures, they intersect. Of course it’s a written word, but it’s
very much music. You have a lot of subtext. So it’s just one more way to try
and do my job well and also to learn, because, as teachers, we want to be in a
position to constantly learn. I think, possibly for you too, teaching comics
and graphic novels keeps me on my toes. I’m learning. I need to learn fast
because the production is fast, because the students are fast, and because the
material is wide but it has to be broken down in creative ways so that we can
teach it.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Contrast: Vassar's Style Blog

We at Contrast aim to showcase Vassar's culture and style in the broadest sense of the word while simultaneously providing you with interesting and useful information. Have an article you want to write? An event you want to advertise? Please read the Rules and Guidelines first. All submissions must be made to the blog editor, Iyana Shelby at iyshelby@vassar.edu

MAGAZINE ARCHIVE

Didn't manage to snag our latest issue? Check out the Archive for a complete collection of our past issues!